Fractional Reserve Banking refers to a banking system which requires the commercial banks to keep only a portion of the money deposited with them as reserves. The bank pays interest on all deposits made by its customers and uses the deposited money to make new loans.
This design does a good job of showing the audience the scale of the amount of money involved. Each $100 stack of bills is carefully used to visualize the amount of money being used in the explanation, and it makes a bigger impact by making it visual.
The sources are carefully documented and all of the visualizations appear to match the numerical values. At the bottom should be some type of copyright or Creative Commons statement, and the text URL back to the original infographic to help readers find the high-resolution version when they see posts of this on other sites.
The designer here did a really good job of telling a simple, focused story in the the infographic that is quick and easy for readers to understand.
Exoplanets is a great infographic that tells one story really well by focusing on one data visualization for the whole story. Randall Munroe at xkcd.com occasionally mixes in some great data visualizations and infographic designs with his comics.
All 786 known planets (as of June 2012) to scale (some planet sizes estimated based on mass).
[Our solar system planets are shown in the middle]
The rest of these orbit other stars and were only discovered recently. Most of them are huge because those are the kind we learned to detect first, but now we’re finding that small ones are actually more common. We know nothing about what’s on any of them. With better telescopes, that would change. This is an exciting time.
This visual is so powerful. You could write in text that we have found 786 extra-solar planet, but the visual helps the reader wrap their head around the scale of that large number and adds the size of the planets as a second level of information.
It’s also a clean design that focuses on communicating the scale of how many planets we have found, and doesn’t try to add all of the other information we know like which stars they orbit, what are their names, when were they discovered, which telescope found them, and who was the team or individual that discovered each one. Just because we have more information doesn’t mean it should all be included in the infographic. The story is cleaner and easier to understand without the clutter of too much information.
Building a search engine is a very complex task. I often find myself trying to justify to people why it is that search engines can’t understand their site. They seem fixated on believing that a search engine should understand it if a human can understand it. The short answer is that with an infinite amount of time the search engine could, but the scale of the Internet makes it oh so VERY hard.
The infographic below tries to give you some sense of the scale of the problem. Please note that a few numbers are hard to truly pin down, but I pulled them from the best sources I could. For example, no one really knows how many pages there are on the web, though Majestic SEO is aware of 3.7 trillion (the number I used) or the average web page size.
Regardless, the message is the same either way. The web is a really complex place!
Designed by InfoNewt, the design gathers data from a number of different sources to put together the picture of complexity. Combining the number of web pages, the average number of links on each web page, the amount of data online and the number of searches every minute, you begin to understand the scale of the challenge search engines face.
This design takes a different approach by citing each data source along with it’s visualization instead of gathering them all at the bottom. I think it works well with this many different data sources, and is easier for the readers to understand where each part of the data comes from. All of the key elements are included at the bottom: copyright, brand logo and the URL to the infographic landing page so readers can always find the original (even when blogs repost it without linking or using the embed code).
I just have to say “Cheers!” to the developer teams that tackle this problem every day. The scope of this challenge will only get bigger in the future!
Thanks to Eric and the team at Stone Temple for being great to work with!
Another great infographic from Randall Munroe’s xkcd online comic. Lakes & Oceans visualizes the various depths of the worlds water, and even includes…a mysterious door that James Cameron built his deep-sea submersible to reach at the bottom of the Marianas Trench and open?
The Tea and Biscuit infographic fromGreen Hat Design in the UK shows avid dunkers of biscuits the proper timing to keep their favorite snacks in the tea or coffee to conquer floppage and avoid the disappointment of contamination! Also available as a high-resolution PDF.
This biscuit infographic is based on 8 of our favourite UK brands which helps us (and others) to get the best out of his (or her) biccy when dunking it in hot tea or coffee, while at the same time assisting the user to avoid… floppage. That unfortunate moment that the biscuit suddenly gives way and contaminates your beverage. Nasty. We feel many could actually benefit from such details. I know it has changed my life.
This one is a fun topic. Apparently the biscuits in the UK are so hard you have to dunk them to eat them… :)
The radial design works well to show three values for each biscuit, and is easy for the reader to compare them. The illustrations work well, even though readers in the U.S. (myself included) won’t recognize any of the biscuits.
A couple things are missing from a Marketing Infographic design perspective. It needs a title! I made up the “Tea & Biscuit Dunking Guide” because it didn’t have a good title of its own. There should be some type of license statement, and in this case I would suggest Creative Commons.
The PDF file is hosted on the Green Hat Design site, but the infographic isn’t displayed anywhere. t’sI hard to share a PDF compared to how easy it is to share an image file online. It REALLY needs it’s own official landing page on the Green Hat Design site to display the infographic, and be the one place you want everyone else (like this blog) to link to. They had uploaded it to visual.ly, and I linked to it there, but that shouldn’t be the primary landing page if they want to drive traffic to their site and awareness to their brand.
The Money Chart from Randall Munroe’s webcomic xkcd.com is a huge poster showing the scope and scale of money flowing all over the world. In a great move for transparency, the entire list of over 200 sources is also online.
This is the poster version of comic #980, which is a guide to money. It started as a project to understand taxes and government spending, and turned into a rather extensive research project. With upwards of 200 sources and 150,000 tiny boxes, it’s best appreciated in poster form. The 36”x24” high-quality poster print allows you to stand back and, all at once, take in the entire world economy.
Each square represents one unit of the specific section it’s in. One dollar, One million dollars, One trillion dollars, etc. To provide some scale, each section is then visualized to scale in the next higher section. Here’s the transition from dollars to thousands.
The SPAM: More than an Annoyance? infographic asks the question “Are there actual physical effects of email spam that impact the environment?” From WebpageFX.com, I like the simple, focused message in this design.
We discovered that a certain amount of Spam emails is actually the equivalent to the level of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions released from driving 3 feet. Discover how far the number of 2010 spam emails can take you across the world! You’ll be shocked! We also highlight the nations most responsible for the furthered adverse impact of Spam’s GHG emissions on our environment. Our hope is that awareness may create change. And a great start to doing your part is by personally installing a spam filter on you’re own email account, forwarding spam emails to spam@uce.gov, as well as informing others!
There are a handful of statistics in the infographic that fall into the lazy-designer “large font” style of visualization. These could have easy been visualized to make the design better. I do like the shaped clouds to indicate countries and breaking down the different actions related to spam, and relating them to the total carbon footprint.
Although I like the overall design, it is missing some key items. Data sources? URL? WebpageFX’s logo? License information?
The new 2012 Death & Taxes poster has been released, and this year it’s better than ever. Designed by Jess Bachman (ByJess.net) this poster visualizes the 2012 proposed U.S. Federal Budget. The Death & Taxes poster is one of the best infographics I’ve ever seen, and it gets better every year.
“Death and Taxes” is a large representational graph and poster of the federal budget. It contains over 500 programs and departments and almost every program that receives over 200 million dollars annually. The data is straight from the president’s 2012 budget request and will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress to begin the fiscal year. All of the item circles are proportional in size to their funding levels for visual comparison and the percentage change from both 2012 and 2002 is included so you can spot trends.
PURCHASE: This year, Jess also had the opportunity to partner with Seth Godin and his Domino Project to make the full-size 24” x 36” poster available for purchase through Amazon. Currently, you can purchase a copy of the poster for $19.99. Also, check out Jess’s video introduction on the Amazon page.
POSTER GIVEAWAY: Cool Infographics is giving away one FREE copy of the poster. The free poster will go to one randomly chosen person that tweets a link to this blog post on Twitter and includes the hashtag: #deathandtaxes. I included the hashtag in the post title, so any retweets will be automatically eligible. NOTE: you must also be following me on Twitter (@rtkrum) so that I can send you a direct message if you have won!
I will choose the winner at 12 noon (Central Time) on Friday, November 11, 2011 (11/11/11). I will contact the winner, and order the poster from Amazon to be delivered to the winner.
INTERVIEW: Similar to last year, Jess was willing to answer some behind-the-scenes questions about this year’s poster:
Cool Infographics: What’s the most interesting thing you learned from the 2012 data?
Jess Bachman: Lots of reductions in the military side. It’s mostly from the OCO war funding, but its interesting to see what actually is getting cut the most. Mostly Army funding and RDT&E across the board. I would think the OCO was mostly Operations and Procurement.
Cool Infographics: Has you design process changed at all this year? What software did you use to help dig through the data and create the design?
Jess Bachman: Well this year I tried to work exclusively within the official spreadsheets, rather than pick out the numbers from the paper (PDF) budget. I think it’s more accurate and easier to get totals. Mainly just used excel and photoshop as always.
Cool Infographics: When did the 2012 data become available, and how long did it take you create this year’s poster?
Jess Bachman: It was supposed to be released in February but it was a month late. I started moving on it at a full clip then got involved with Amazon/Godin and the timelines shifted quite a bit, so while I usually get the post out in April, it was released in September this year.
Cool Infographics: How did working with Seth Godin and the Domino project come about?
Jess Bachman: Seth just emailed me out of the blue. We talked and it seemed like a no-brainer.
Cool Infographics: How does working with Amazon and the Domino project change how you print and distribute the poster?
Jess Bachman: Well previously my Mom did most of the shipper and I also had a 3rd party do fulfillment and shipping. It’s a rather time consuming and frustrating process. Sending out orders, doing customer support, paying vendors, etc. Now it’s all in Amazon’s hands. They got it printed and of course are warehousing and shipping it too. I’m quite glad as they do a much better job of shipping than I do. Of course they also take their cut of the profits. As for Domino, they have their own distribution channels and lists and also work closely with Amazon to make sure the product page is well presented too. This year it reached #18 on the best sellers list. I guess that makes me a best selling author. I don’t think I could have accomplished that without Domino/Amazon.
Cool Infographics: I see you made a video to include on the Amazon page, how was that experience?
Jess Bachman: Seth told me they needed a video ASAP so I just made one that afternoon. I suppose I would put more effort into it next year but videos help sell products and i think it does a good job of that.
Cool Infographics: Any new design features added to the poster this year?
Jess Bachman: I wanted to include some non-governmental items in the poster this year for reference. They are in the bottom left and include things like the size of the video game industry, bill gate’s net worth and other such things. When talking about billions of dollars all the time, sometimes you need to get out of government-mode to put those figures into further context.
Cool Infographics: The past posters have been shared very heavily in social media, which social sharing sites have you found most successful?
Jess Bachman: Well, Digg has traditionally been a big asset, but then Digg fell apart so I no longer pay attention to it. In general, I have abandoned the traditional accelerants like Digg, reddit, etc. and instead focus on my network of bloggers and influencers. Combine that with Facebook liking and you can really spread something.
Cool Infographics: Last year we talked about some favorite places that have the poster on display. Any new ones this year?
Jess Bachman: Well, with a larger audience and hopefully more sales, the poster will be everywhere. Unfortunately, I get lots of requests for discounts for schools with tight budgets, but I have no control over price anymore. I can say that an iOS app is in development so that will be interesting. My ultimate goal is to get on the Daily Show to talk about the poster in April. People constantly tell me I need to be on there, and I’m a huge fan, so I figure I have a good shot, just need to nag the right people.
The United States Oil Consumption infographic from the Christensen Law Firm looks at the massive amounts of oil we use in this country. Where does it come from? How do we use it? How does the U.S. compare to the rest of the world?
Have you ever asked yourself how much you actually know about the oil you use? Many politicians and media outlets discuss U.S. oil consumption as if the average American understands what the reality of U.S. oil habits are and the extent of our dependence on foreign oil sources. U.S. Oil Usage is an attempt to educate the average person about where U.S. oil comes from, how it is being used and how U.S. consumption compares with that of other major oil consumers. The information is both shocking and concerning!
I think the first doughnut chart that breaks down the imports by country, should have included the domestic oil as well to put the imports into proper context. We don’t get 21% of our oil from Canada, we get 21% of our imported oil from Canada. That’s a difference that could be misinterpreted by the reader.
Personally, I thought more of the oil was used by the airline industry, but automotive is completely dominant.
Randy
